Contemporary Anglophone Writers

City College, Macaulay Honors College, Fall 2020 – Spring 2022

The “revolutionary conditions” of literature, Deleuze and Guattari wrote, can be found in literature that “a minority constructs in a major language.” Why, how? They ascribe the insurgent potential of this form of writing to its capacity for a collective and political perspective, and its “deterritorialization” of language. With an eye to these conditions, we will study the “deterritorialization” of English literature in the work of Anglophone authors from Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and Australia. Attending to local and global histories of English, we will approach the discourse of different nations and regions in three-part units: first, the precedent of fiction that reflects on the aftermath of British imperialism; second, contemporary work that interrogates the reconfigured social orders and power dynamics of decolonization; and third, critical theories about expression and history or memory in each region.

Contemporary writings about histories of globalization, war, diaspora, and migration deepen the present. We will permeate these histories through modes of expression, such as hybridity, creolization, code switching, translation, and multimedia. Taking inspiration from our materials, we will engage in essay writing that is critical and creative, personally meaningful and politically informed.

World Literature: Enlightenment to Present

City College, Macaulay Honors College, Fall 2019 – Spring 2020

The concept of world literature seems to promise access to different cultures by way of inclusion and universal traits of humanity. But which authors enter the global market and which aspects of literature, or humanity, count as universal are far from being decided universally. We will test the thesis that one of the most translatable currents in world literature is not the transmission of worldviews, but the way that these texts undermine dominant worldviews. Exploring different views of modernity, we will examine the tension between representations of society and individual consciousness, especially through the motifs of psychological illusion or disillusionment. How do the texts portray distinct sociopolitical contexts, and what can we learn from them about literary form and representations of modernity? We will read short stories, novels, essays, poetry, and drama traversing England, the US, Russia, India, Norway, China, Argentina, Brazil, and Nigeria. Topics include nation and empire, bureaucracy and the administered world, madness and subjectivity, tradition and power, race and gender, and colonialism and conceptions of freedom.

Eighteenth-Century English Novel

Brooklyn College, Spring 2019

This course examines novels of the eighteenth century, their myriad experiments in narrative form, and the contemporary resonance of their sociopolitical engagements. Attention to generic innovation – satire, the picaresque, slavery narrative, memoir, realism, and sentimentalism – will ground our discussions in the literary devices with which the texts entertain us and entertain distinct imaginaries of England, Britain, and the world. The eighteenth century consisted in such intertwined yet sometimes contradictory historical moments as the Enlightenment, empire and slavery, revolution, and the rise of capitalism. Therefore, we will complement the novel with critical, philosophical, and political essays to understand the ingenuity with which the literary narratives redeploy cultural logics and anxieties of the period to their advantage. In the so-called age of reason, how does the form of the novel function as a mode of persuasion in its length and wit to subvert moral assumptions and conventions or even to reassert them in new social terms? Themes include dogmatism, abolitionism, feminism, and liberalism. We will view digitized copies of the original books to triangulate eighteenth-century reading publics and our interpretations.

The Quest for Ethnic, Cultural, and National Identity

Brooklyn College, Fall 2018

Music in Literature (Advanced Composition)

Brooklyn College, Spring 2017 – Spring 2018

Writing Deep Time (Advanced Composition)

Brooklyn College, Fall 2017

Introduction to Expository Writing

Brooklyn College, Fall 2016